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I’ve just been re-reading Freud’s remarkable essay, Mourning and Melancholia, in which he presciently paves the way for current controversies on the differences and similarities between mourning and depression. These differences are an ongoing topic of robust debate in psychiatric and psychological circles: when does grief for the loss of a loved one become depressive illness requiring treatment; should mourning be immediately treated with anti depressants, what are the wider repercussions of diagnosing grief as a pathological state?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is the 2013 update to the American Psychiatric Association’s classification and diagnostic tool. In the United States and in Australia, the DSM serves as an authority for psychiatric diagnosis. According to this informative Q and A in the Huffington Post, in the DSM’s last edition the committee removed the “bereavement exclusion” from both depression and adjustment disorders. What this means in its simplest terms is that a person who is grieving a loss potentially may be diagnosed with depression or an adjustment disorder It is the removal of the bereavement exclusion from these diagnoses that has become highly controversial.

A major aspect of this controversy is that with the pathologising of grief and the introduction by the DSM-5 of a category of mental illness known as “complex” or “abnormal” grief, drug companies now have a wider market for anti depressants, and doctors could be encouraged to prescribe these drugs as soon as two weeks after the death of a loved one.

This pathologising leads to an economy of grief that Freud likely did not imagine, though one of his three core principles of the conceptual architecture of psychic organisation was his Economic Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, psychic process can be evaluated in terms of gain and loss, for example, when a symptom mobilises a certain quantity of energy, other activities show signs of impoverishment. There is a circulation of value, a distribution of resources in the psychic household, or what he also referred to as the household of the soul.

In mourning, it’s not unusual for the mourner to withdraw her interest from the world, so demanding is her labour of grieving. In melancholia, a similar withdrawal might occur, with the distinct difference that in melancholia it is not necessary that there be an external loss: the depression can emanate from internal sources. In both cases, psychic resources are focused on loss, depriving other possible concerns of energetic engagement.

When grief is co-opted by capitalism it is commodified: by defining it as an illness, the opportunity arises for the marketing of a cure, or an amelioration of its symptoms. In a similar manner, the pathologising of post traumatic stress disorder in American war veterans has led to intense drug therapy, often causing uncontrollable and deadly side effects.

There is little abnormal in the intense reaction of an individual to traumatic circumstances of all kinds. The pathology lies not in the individual’s reaction to a situation, but in the situation itself. War is pathological. The sexual abuse of children is pathological behaviour on the part of the abuser. The distress and dis-integration of people subjected to pathological events is a normal human reaction to diseased circumstances.

Capitalism profits from pathological circumstances, and it’s in the interest of capitalism that such circumstances continue to exist. Those who suffer adversity as a consequence find their adversity pathologised, commodified and exploited, in the instance of grief and the war veteran’s post traumatic stress, by pharmaceutical companies.

There is a growing body of dissent on the usefulness of intense drug treatment of war veterans, and an increasing suspicion that the unholy alliance between drug companies and the US military is the driving force behind what many medical professionals regard as dangerous over-medication. Psychiatrist Dr Peter Breggin, author of “Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatry Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime,” claims the increase in drug treatment of veterans: …cannot be accounted for by anything other than military decisions at the very top that were certainly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, which markets from the top down, then the drugs flow to millions.

The economy of the household of the soul is obliterated by the capitalist economy of Big Pharma, and the labour of mourning, which is also a significant aspect of post traumatic stress, is named as mental illness requiring drug therapy.

This is not to say that drug therapy is always unnecessary or unhelpful. That would be a ridiculous position to take. Rather, as well as drug therapy we ought to be considering a causal inversion in which the circumstances are recognised as pathological, rather than the normal human reactions to traumatic situations that give rise to disturbing symptoms, disrupting the individual’s psychic economy.

Today, all mourning is in danger of being defined as melancholia in the interests of profit, and we are all impoverished as a result.

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As readers of this blog and The Practice of Goodness will know, I’ve been struggling with the loss of my husband for some time now. My loss began not with his death, but when he suffered a massive stroke that left him paralysed, unable to speak, and subject to a degenerative process that was agonising to witness, and during which he became increasingly comatose and unable to recognise me. This went on for over two years, culminating in his death in June, 2014.

It has only been in the last few months that I’ve allowed myself to begin to grieve this awful period. Instead, I engaged in a variety of displacements, including embarking on an affair with a man who was also seriously ill, but well enough to ask for and respond to love, concern, and desire in ways in which my husband could not. For much of my life I had also sublimated a powerful wish (and its devastating regrets) to have been able to help and save my stepfather, who committed suicide when I was sixteen. I was in the zone, as I put it to myself, of desperately wanting to save men to whom I had a powerful attachment.

Were I to be Freudian about my affair I would name it as transference, the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another, frequently but not necessarily originating in childhood experience.

Grief makes you do weird stuff.

It was only when the affair came to a horrible end that I collapsed for several months into a state of profound grief during which I couldn’t write, or read, or engage with the world, and during which I had consistent and terrifying suicidal thoughts. I spent hours every day trying to work out a way in which I could end my life without anybody knowing I’d done it on purpose, because even in the midst of this collapse, I couldn’t bear to leave such a legacy for my loved ones to deal with. I imagined in great detail the methods I could avail myself of. I stockpiled drugs. I could simply disappear, I thought, and die in the forest, but then I realised the anguish my disappearance would cause, without even as much as the resolution of knowledge of my death.

The only circumstance that kept me in my life was my love for my three-year-old grandson, Archie, with whom I have an exceptional bond. There is much yet to pass between Archie and me, and I could not, even in my worst hours, deliberately leave before seeing that through. He will never know that he saved my life, and nor should he.

I sought no psychiatric or psychological help through this period. I mostly stayed in bed or lay on the couch, exhausted. I suspect that had I presented myself at the doctor’s in this state I would have been diagnosed as severely depressed, probably hospitalised, and encouraged to take anti depressants, and that would have been a responsible reaction on the doctor’s part. Although I had to visit the doctor for other reasons I never mentioned my state of mind, and my physical illness accounted for weight loss, lethargy and other symptoms.

In retrospect, I think I simply didn’t have the energy to find the words, let alone speak them. As Freud would have noted, the symptoms of my mourning drew heavily on my psychic resources, and left every other aspect dangerously impoverished.

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Grief is always complicated. Nobody comes as an adult to the loss of a loved one without an accumulation of losses and griefs of varying degrees, many of which remain unresolved because we aren’t taught or encouraged to resolve them. The shock of loss, which is always as shock even if you have, like I did, two years to know it’s coming, ruptures the protective membranes that allow us to conduct productive daily life in an environment that is, although we might deny this, all too frequently hostile to our psychic and physical well-being.

One of the unforeseen side effects of the massive rupture caused by significant loss is that it allows other sorrows, other traumas, other losses that haven’t been dealt with to leak through, infusing and complicating the main event and causing overwhelming feelings that transport us to an altered state. Grief is an altered state. It is nothing like “ordinary” life. Once you’re in grief, anything can happen, although that might not always be evident to observers.

Increasingly, we are encouraged to medicate these altered states so they achieve a two-fold outcome for capitalism: we buy drugs to get us off the couch, back into the workforce and consuming again, but what does such an approach do to stabilise our psychic economy?

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The greatest sacrifice we make to live in our current dominant culture is the sacrifice of self-knowledge and self-understanding. Who has time to unravel the psychic complexities that drive us? And yet, what could possibly be more important to us as individuals and as communal beings than understanding how and why we do what we do?

Instead, we have drugs whose sole purpose is to render us capable of functioning within this society, in the manner that supports its capitalist goals. The adverse effects major and minor of anti depressants, for example, were for me antithetical to a life fully experienced, fully lived. They dulled my senses and my mind, and didn’t suit my chemistry at all. There is little opportunity offered for the processes of the psyche, which can often seem slow and laborious, to unfold, and anything that takes one’s attention away from worldly considerations is regarded as a symptom of pathology.

I’m not done with my labour of mourning. I will be grateful for the rest of my life that this crisis occurred at a time when I was able to withdraw, and allow it to take its course. When eventually I got myself to a psychiatrist I chose an analyst, one who would not persuade me to medicate myself out of the psychic processes, but on the contrary, travel with me through them.

Freud was, of course, both formed and constrained by his times, as are we all to some degree. There is much to disagree with in his theories, especially for a woman like me, who found her first liberation in feminism. Yet to revisit his writings is to be astounded at his vision, and the poetic manner in which he expressed that vision. Just now, his essay on Mourning and Melancholia is a source of great comfort, like the right poem at a particular moment can ease the heart with the reassurance that others have felt these things, mad and isolated as they might seem to be.

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I’ve decided to re-open my blog The Practice of Goodness as the place where I post stories, poems, fragments, etc, keeping No Place for Sheep for politics and commentary. This piece to my late husband is the last of its kind I’ll post here.

Cabinet of Wonders

I dreamed I was walking through the park at the end of an autumn day. The tree shadows were long and the light golden. I saw you on the path in front of me, and hurried to catch up. Your hands were in the pockets of your jeans. You wore the dark purple sweater I knitted for you to keep out the cold you felt so keenly. The pattern was elaborate, it took months to finish, and you marvelled that my hands, with wool and needles, wove for you enduring warmth.

My wife made this, you told people.

Sometimes you would cradle my face in your hands and look at me and say, my wife.

When I caught up with you I slipped my hand into your pocket to touch yours. You turned your head and your look was quizzical. I saw the man I thought was you, wasn’t. The difference was barely discernible, but it was there. Shaken, I pulled my hand out of your pocket. We kept walking side by side, in silence.

We came to a bandstand, painted white with green trim, and hung with paper lanterns. Silent still, we walked up three wooden steps to the platform. We stayed there for some time, leaning on the railing, watching park life. I started to cry. You gazed at me then you pointed to a small house with double doors, off to the right, whose windows top and bottom looked to be filled with hand-carved toys, painted silks, and the mysterious devices of starlit sorcery. A cabinet of wonders, I thought. Our hearts.

You started down the bandstand steps. I cried harder. You looked back at me and smiled and pointed again to the house. I was to go with you there, I believed.

I could barely see for weeping as I stumbled down the wooden steps and followed you. But I was far behind and you forged ahead and I knew I wouldn’t catch up.

That moment in time, between when I put my hand in your pocket and when I realised the man I thought was you was not, has now settled deep in the cradle of my belly, where it has taken on the qualities of eternity.

I watched as you looked back and raised your goodbye hand. I watched as you disappeared into the cabinet of wonders. I watched as its doors closed behind you and I did not try to follow.

Awake, I know again that you are dead, and there is not one part of me that does not grieve you.

Wife. Time. Eternity. Wonders. The mysterious devices of starlit sorcery. Come back, and I will throw my arms around you.

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Today, for the first time since you died, I sat with someone in a room and wept and wept for the loss of you.

I know you will understand why it has taken me these whole six months to find the strength to grieve for you. You well know the strength that grieving demands. You thought Freud was firstly a poet, with his “labour of mourning.”

I am trying to imagine which quote you would find for me now, because you always found a quote for me in all my situations and at times, I was less than grateful.

Perhaps it would be Auden: “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.”

Perhaps it would be Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

Perhaps it would be Blake: “For all eternity I forgive you and you forgive me.”

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I am lost without you. I have no idea how to proceed in a world that no longer has you in it.

He asked me, the man in whose room I sat today, a quiet man who well knows the uses of silence, he asked me, what did he do, your husband?

I told him your doctorate was on Shakespeare’s comedies. I told him you loved Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, and Lenny Bruce, and Seinfeld, and Larry David, and William Blake, and Tony Soprano, and John Donne, and Bach’s concertos, and Mahler, and the list of what you loved was way too long, you were interested in everything, and I told him how sometimes I would tell you that your mind was so open, everything just fell out.

I told him that you fought with me about Foucault, and feminism, and I fought with you about F.R. Leavis and fucking white male privilege and the damn canon. I told him how you were the only man I’d ever known who was confident enough in himself to tell me I was smarter than he was. I told him how you used to look at me and say, “I could die happy right now, just being with you.”

But mostly I just cried, love.

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The Courier Mail coverage of cricketer Phil Hughes’ funeral includes a heart-rending close-up of his dad Greg, face contorted with grief, carrying his son’s coffin on his shoulder. It also includes a similarly heartbreaking shot of Hughes’ mother Virginia, in deep grief and shock.

I wondered what could be the purpose of these shots. Anyone with a gram of imagination would know the parents are devastated at the loss of their son. None of us needs to see images of their devastation in a newspaper to convince us this is the case.

I could barely look at the images. Not because I’m squeamish about grief, but because I couldn’t help thinking how I would feel if similar images of me and my grief-stricken family were used to sell newspapers. I think that is the only possible reason for these photographs to have been taken, to sell newspapers. I don’t think there is any public interest issue involved in showing us close-ups of the Hughes’ family’s shock and devastation. It’s grief porn. It’s disgusting.

A subject photographed without consent surely becomes an object. If the image is then used for profit, the objectification is complete. We are so inured to this process it generally passes unremarked, but really, what right does the Courier Mail have to profit from a deeply private expression of grief?

The funeral was a public event, it can be argued. Anyone attending was fair game for the media, no matter what their state of mind. This apparently justifies appropriating grief as spectacle, for Murdoch’s profit.

The agonisingly distorted faces of the bereaved family will always be the money shot in grief porn. As if their loss is not enough to bear.

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Now and again in a life, one runs into what I like to call a shit field – a series of apparently unconnected events that occur simultaneously, or hard on one another’s heels, all of which share a common theme.

It can be difficult to recognise you’re in the shit field at the time, because its very nature clouds the mind and takes a toll on perceptions.

For the last twelve months, and particularly the last four or five, some of the effects of trudging through the shit field have been an increasing lack of creativity, loss of interest in the world, crippling anxiety, depression, and a sense of having completely lost control of my life and my ability to make good decisions.

I apologise to everyone who has stayed with the blog, for my increasing lack of output, and the deteriorating quality of the posts I have managed.

I wrote here about the experience of being with my beloved husband last year, after he suffered a massive stroke. I underestimated the length of time it would take me to recover from the loss of the man with who I had shared a long, fraught love affair of such intensity that I couldn’t ever imagine loving anyone else. I’m familiar with the Kubler Ross theory of the five stages of grief, though in my experience they are not necessarily consecutive, and I don’t recall ever doing any bargaining, probably because I don’t believe in a higher power so I don’t have a transcendental exteriority in my life with whom to cut a deal.

Apart from that, I’d say the model is fairly accurate, and applies to important loss of any kind, not solely death and dying, if one needs a framework to help explain the chaos inside.

I also underestimated the exhaustion I would feel and for how long I would feel it, after week upon week of sitting at my husband’s bedside, watching him deteriorate, watching in shocked despair as he railed and screamed at me in a language I could no longer understand, and at the end of these rantings, trembling as I watched him break down, as he stroked my face with his one good hand, and begged me for I knew not what. I assumed comfort. Many times I climbed onto his bed and laid my body the length of his frail frame, and held him while he fumbled, sobbing, for my breasts.

I would leave him at the end of these gruelling days, and make my way back to the Bondi Beach apartment a friend’s daughter had loaned me while she was overseas. Sometimes I’d catch a bus. More often I’d walk, as a way to calm myself, and reconnect with the world outside of the nursing home. I was not really a fit companion for anyone, and generally too exhausted for dinners or meetings with old friends. I found it difficult to sleep. These days I hate the city, and found adapting to its racket after the silence of my north coast home, almost impossible. I missed my dog. I missed him something awful.

Our life together, mine and A’s, had been largely conducted in Bondi where we lived at the beach, apart from a brief period when A realised a life-long dream, and bought a converted Pittwater ferry that we moored at the Newport Marina and lived on for a couple of years on and off. Our weekend pleasure was to motor slowly round the waterways, and come back to haul up our crab pots full of blue swimmers that A would then cook in a huge pot and we’d eat for supper with wine or a beer. I remember once standing beside him at the boat’s wheel, my skirt flying open in the wind, my hair whipping at my face, and A turning to me and saying “If I died now, here with you, I would die a happy man.”

I told him this and other stories of our life as I sat beside him, holding his hand. I think he heard. I think he remembered. I think it gave him some sense of who he was, and had been.

I know now that I had never loved him more than I did those months I sat vigil at his bedside. I don’t know where that love came from. I felt it enter me as I walked through the nursing home doors. I felt its energy fill me as I climbed the stairs to his room. I felt that love sustain me through everything that occurred, every day it occurred. That love overwhelmed me. Without it, I couldn’t have lasted a week. I’m not a believer in anything much. But I believe in that love.

When my friend’s daughter returned from New York, I moved to the glorious cliff top eyrie owned by my friend, Elisabeth Wynhausen, who recently died, who swore me to secrecy when she discovered her cancer, and whom I miss.

The theme of my shit field is emerging.

Then, to my utter surprise, when I had decided such things were over for me, earlier this year I fell in love. The circumstances were challenging. Everything indicated this was not going to be easy. And yet again, out of nowhere, that love swept in with such power and took hold of me, even harder than before if that was possible, and I said a yes.

Well, in keeping with the theme of the shit field the challenges were too great, and I find myself once again in the stages of grief, or perhaps I never really got out of them.

What strikes me as remarkable, however, is that something so comparatively short-lived can cause an anguish not dissimilar to the loss of the love affair of decades. Of course there isn’t the history to mourn. But the loss. Oh god, the loss.

Or perhaps it is an accumulation of loss that finally overwhelms. I can’t tell yet. I’m still too much in love. I haven’t caught up with events. I’m still talking to him in my head as if he hasn’t gone. I’m still hurt when there’s no good morning and goodnight. I haven’t got used to the loss of him beginning my days and ending my nights. The absence of his presence.

So, I doubt I’ll be out of the shit field anytime soon. Thank you for staying around.

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A few months ago I wrotehere about spending time with my seriously ill husband, and my experience of coming to terms with the end of a love that had been everything to me.

It took years to accept that love was over, and what I eventually took from that lonely, arid time was painful instruction on the power of human attachment.

When I visited A last year, desperately ill after a massive stroke, unable to speak coherently and only intermittently recognising me, our life together did indeed parade itself before my eyes, and I laid many things to rest as I sat for weeks beside his bed, holding his hands while he struggled to tell me he loved me and always would.

The miracle was, that after everything that went wrong we did still love each other. I wasn’t altogether surprised to find that in me, because I am very bad at endings. The life may no longer be a shared one, but something in me, deep in my belly, refuses to entirely let go of the love. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing, it just is. So I can look at someone I loved years ago and think oh, yes, I loved you and oh yes, the ending was hard and I hated you for a while, and oh yes, though I don’t want to do anything about it and my life has changed, still there is tenderness, and gratitude for what we knew together.

Grief is an altered state. It can take you by surprise, long after you think you’ve done with it. It becomes less wild, less consuming as time passes. It can take on a sorrowful tenderness that for all its softness, still wrenches the heart. Grief can be triggered unexpectedly, long after you think you’re done with it, and you find yourself needing to hide away while you work out what has suddenly gone wrong with your breathing, and why out of nowhere you badly want to cry.

For example, I walked into a room today where someone was playing Mendelssohn’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, #2 in D Major. I listened to this Sonata, along with the Brahms #1 in F, during a very rough period in my marriage, during the last of many journeys A and I made together, down the Mekong, through Laos. I’ve heard both many times since, of course, but never without some emotion, the power of which has lessened over time. Yet today, for reasons I can’t explain, I heard the familiar first movement as if I was back on that long boat, sitting on my backpack beside A, both of us silenced by the misery of knowing it was too late for this journey or any other journey together, and neither of us able to end it.

I don’t have a list of things I want to do before I die. At times I think, vaguely, of travelling to places I’ve never been because it would be excellent to leave the earth having seen as much of it as possible. At times I think I want to go back to the place where I was born one more time, because every time I return to that North Yorkshire country I feel a primitive and powerful sense of belonging that I have never felt anywhere else.

But lately I’ve been thinking that these things come a poor second to love, in all its frequently unexpected and varied manifestations, and it’s likely love that tops my bucket list.

Today my friend said, there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship is there? There is, I said, after a while. The perfect relationship is the one where you care enough to bother struggling through the shitty bits and find you still want to stay in it. The perfect relationship is the one where you don’t want to struggle through the shit, and you have the decency and the courage to leave before you cause anymore damage to yourself and the other. Love is required for both. Isn’t it?

Today I re-learned that nothing ends when you think it has. This annoys me, because I don’t live easily with loose ends. Somewhere along the way I’ve got it into my head that one must have “closure,” resolution, well-defined endings in order to move onto anything new. But actually, I’m coming to think that’s crap. My life is a chaos of ongoing love of varying kinds and depths, and I can’t think how to tidy up any of it. Perhaps I don’t have to? Perhaps instead I must learn to live with the disorder of a functioning human heart? Perhaps for years to come I will unexpectedly feel grief for my husband, for my dead mother, for my friend, for everyone I’ve loved and will love, with various degrees of complexity and difficulty, success and failure.

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While I agree that grief is certainly a state of consciousness that differs considerably from the everyday, I don’t think it’s quite another country as some would have it.

However, it does seem to have the capacity to throw everything outside its parameters into stark relief. Suddenly one sees that none of the emperors have clothes . For example, when I tuned into QandA on Monday evening I saw not a panel of distinguished and erudite guests, but a pack of braying, self-important, self-opinionated talking heads, about whom I could only think “Why? Why?” before silencing them with the remote.

Grief has severely curtailed my tolerance for talking heads. I have no idea why this particular group has become the target of my ill-will. I’m having the same difficulty with The Drum as I did with QandA. Who are these people? I ask myself as I collapse, stunned and exhausted on the couch, looking for a bit of relief from the demands of living and dying. How did they come to be? Why are they everywhere? From what primary source have they metastasized? How is it that they manage to reduce the most intense, the most numinous, the most awful,the most terrifying, the most special of human experiences into highly articulate banality, just by opening their mouths about it?

Grief also disturbs one’s sleep patterns. The Dog and I sit alone in the lounge at 3 am, sharing Vegemite toast and drinking tea (well, The Dog doesn’t drink tea) and watching episodes of Breaking Bad. This comforts me. I need fiction like I need food and water. I need story. I need a level of complexity and emotion that is absent in the clichés and sound bytes trotted out by the talking heads, who really, I’m beginning to believe, just want the chance to show everybody how clever they are. They’ll talk about anything. They aren’t required to have any expertise, or even to be particularly informed. All they need to know is how to talk.

I mean in what universe is it just fine for female genital mutilation to be reduced to a three-minute segment of a talk show? Write about it, read about it, think about it, but chat about it?

In the midst of all my other troubles, there is the matter of my feckin’ Swedish chair. As some of you will know this chair has caused me injury in the recent past, to the degree that I put it out for the tip but was obliged by Mrs Chook to give it a second chance. Well, it has once again decided to throw its castors and land me on my arse on the floor. In the early hours of this morning I contemplated a trip to Ikea for a new chair. I imagined shopping in Ikea in my current state of consciousness. I see nothing to be gained by such an exercise, and much to be lost.

As I’ll be living in Sydney for a couple of months from next Monday, the chair won’t be an issue and maybe someone else will go to Ikea and get me a new one so I don’t have to.

The other thing is music. I can hardly bear to listen to music because so much of it makes me howl, and I mean howl. Not for me the quiet sob. I dare not use my iPod in public, for fear I will start to howl. As there is much of a practical nature to attend to , the time for the luxury of howling is not yet arrived, though I’m considering taking some alone time over the next day to close all the doors and windows, play music very loudly, and howl and thrash till I can howl and thrash no more.

Grief can be so alarmingly visceral.

On the whole, it seems to me from my admittedly jaundiced perspective, people talk too damn much. I could count on the fingers of one hand the people who have something interesting and substantial to say. Why can’t we have good story on our televisions instead of the crap opinions of professional talking heads? Who cares what most of them think? Who cares about their blah de blah de blah de blah? Who cares about their shallow pseudo analysis? Why don’t they all just STFU